I was recently discussing with some friends about our favourite horror novels and more precisely which specific kind of horror each one of us preferred (this article can be a good introduction to the debate). I had no troubles selecting my beloved horror books, some of which I have reviewed here – Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker being some obvious names. In my case, what works the magic is first of all a certain kind of atmosphere and the impending feeling of doom more than anything else. Supernatural is an obvious plus when well handled, but by no means something necessary. Whatever lurks in the realm of physical world is good enough, and by extension anything hidden in the depth of time (historical horror) or space (a literary equivalent of Alien) might work as well.
A scene from Carpenter’s movie The Thing (1982)
But then I had a second thought. Loving horror is in a way a contradiction in terms. If horror is by definition “something that causes feelings of fear, dread, and shock : something that is shocking and horrible” (Merriam-Webster), it’s not enjoyment we should look at when identifying our very personal brand of horror, the one that scares the hell out of us. More, it should instead be of the kind that makes us cover our eyes in fear – when not churn our stomach in disgust.
If this is true, then it’s clearly another kind of horror the one that gets me. It’s nowhere the supernatural, because there’s no ghost or demon that can make me shiver more than superficially. And it’s certainly not the gore, the splatter – that makes me smile at times, and more than often I’d wrinkle my nose for lack of subtlety. No, what makes me unfalteringly queasy is the crude and nude display of cruelty, the realisation that nothing equals the nastiness of humans at their worst: what they summon is pure evil, embodied in violence, random acts of madness or sheer barbarity.
I came across a few writers able to translate it in good (awful) stories, but not many reached the scaring perfection of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door – a book I read many years ago and whose pages are still fresh in my mind like it were yesterday. That book made me wince and cringe, and not because I was much younger and more impressionable at that time: it was because horror was almost palpable in Ketchum’s novel, and the sense of doom you perceive at the beginning manages, surprisingly, to get worse and worse, until you get sick, in a sort of incredulity.
You get sick, but you can’t put it down: that evil takes you despite of your malaise, and you keep at it, gobbling it up in one night – to discover you won’t be sleeping well for the following days.
I had a go again at it as soon as The Girl Next Door became available on Kindle, i.e. few months ago: not because I did not remember it – I remembered only too well – but because I wanted to analyse it with a colder mind. I won’t give away anything of this rather simple plot. It is a rather compact, well-written book, and worth a reading under any standard. It reminds Golding’s The Lord of the Flies – first of all because children are involved, and children display an astonishing degree of cruelty. But Ketchum’s novel is even worse: here adults are not there to prevent things to unravel. They are there to act as children’s black souls, pushing them to the edge.
The worst thing of all? I found out the novel was based on true events, the story of Sylvia Likens and the abuses and tortures she suffered from Gertrude Baniszewski and her children. Proving me I was right: real horror is purely human.
In case you want have a look at this shocking book that will likely stay in your mind for long, long time, here the details. A movie based on the novel has been released in 2007, but it’s nowhere as good as Ketchum’s novel.
For more about Sylvia Likens’ true story, this is instead a good starting point (warning: NSFW).